Source confidentiality is the cornerstone of good journalism, particularly journalism that makes a difference; once journalists start selling out their sources because the authorities wave jail time at them, the notion of a free press is as dead as Elvis.

We might as well all change our names to Fox News, throw the First Amendment on the fire and toast marshmallows over it.(...)That’s fine. I get that. I even get the argument, though I’m not sure I buy it, that sometimes national security outweighs the canons of a free press. My problem with that is, a lot of times “national security” can best be translated as “I’m doing something that’s six kinds of illegal and I don’t want anyone to know about it.”

My problem this time around is, Barry Bonds isn’t threatening to fly the red-eye out of L.A. into a skyscraper.

There’s no national security issue here, no shadowy plot to take down the republic (unless you consider the Tampa Bay Devil Rays a plot to undermine national confidence in one of our bulwark institutions). There’s only two reporters doing their jobs, an administration hostile to reporters doing their jobs, and prosecutors who want to take the easy way out.

Normally, I expect the sports page to be simplistic and vaguely conservative. When I opened the Tuesday paper at work, I found this instead - an editorial by FWJG sports reporter Ben Smith saying that the jailing of Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, the two San Francisco Chronicle writers who blew open the Barry Bonds-BALCO debacle, is harmful to the nation as a whole because it is, quite frankly, stifling the free press.

Even moreso, it includes a few nuggets of wisdom you rarely see on the sports beat - most notably, the outright hostility of the administration towards investigative journalism and the invocation of "national security" as a way of trying to keep anyone from knowing what's really going on. Considering the flap that's been made lately over things being kept under wraps because of, you guessed it, "national security", it's pretty hard not to agree with Smith's assessments.

Keith Olbermann flipped out when he opened his home mail yesterday. The acerbic host of "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" was terrified when he opened a suspicious-looking letter with a California postmark and a batch of white powder poured out. A note inside warned Olbermann, who’s a frequent critic of President Bush’s policies, that it was payback for some of his on-air shtick. The caustic commentator panicked and frantically called 911 at about 12:30 a.m., sources told The Post’s Philip Messing. An NYPD HazMat unit rushed to Olbermann’s pad on Central Park South, but preliminary tests indicated the substance was harmless soap powder. However, that wasn’t enough to satisfy Olbermann, who insisted on a checkup. He asked to be taken to St. Luke’s Hospital, where doctors looked him over and sent him home. Whether they gave him a lollipop on the way out isn’t known. Olbermann had no comment.

The Post, for those unaware, is owned by right-wing conglom-o-crat Rupert Murdoch, owner of Faux News. And it shows, too, in garbage like this. If this letter were sent to some right-wing blowhard like Pigman Limpdick or Parrot-Boy Hannity, it'd be front-page news getting coverage on every network and in every newspaper. But because it happened to Keith Olbermann, someone who opens his mouth and unleashes a deluge of utter fucking truth, they turn it into a smear campaign and a massive joke.

Now that this story has broken, I'm waiting to hear what Olbermann has to say on it. I bet there's gonna be some sore asses at the Post real soon!

Oh, and if you'd like to talk some sense into the cock who decided to make fun of a man who thought he might be in danger, here's her address: paula.froelich@nypost.com. Make sure to show that you've got more of a spine than her - be civil if you speak up.

I'm one of the many who thinks it's a big scam by you-know-who. Hey, they're all in cahoots, so why not make one of the largest complaints disappear?

Let's not fool ourselves into thinking these prices are "cheap", though. As my roommate pointed out, there was a point when $2 a gallon was considered highway robbery. Oddly enough, who was President then? Just asking.

Of course, Falwell has immediately started calling his comments "tongue-in-cheek" (the usual wingnut response when they say something idiotic - "I was just kidding! Really!"), never mind the fact that he knows that's a filthy-ass lie.

9/21/2006

I'm stunned. I'm utterly, completely stunned. I'm shaky and anxious and shocked beyond belief. I live in rural Ohio and I have been denied EC.

Two months ago I stopped taking birth control. My body finally decided that it was fed up and the cycle of side-effects began again as they have every time I've taken hormonal contraception since I was a teenager.

(...)

Folks, the condom broke Friday night and I searched all weekend for someone who could prescribe me EC. It is now Monday and I have to report that I have been unable to find anyone who will write me a fucking prescription for EC. None of the hospitals in the surrounding counties would write it for me. I stopped my search at about 100 miles from my home because my telephone book wouldn't take me out any further than that.

I have been asked about my sexual practices. Whether I'm 'monogamous' or 'in a relationship' if I'm married, if I have kids, how many kids I have, if I was raped or 'traumatized' but there wasn’t' ONE question about my health. Not one. The few places that said that they had a doctor who would occasionally write prescriptions for EC told me that I had to ask for that doctor specifically and then they proceeded to tell me that I would be 'interviewed' to see if I meet that doctors 'criteria' and then they proceeded to ask me all the above questions before telling me that I should 'try anyway' and I 'might be able to talk him into it'.

I cannot fucking believe this. Where is the fucking morality in denying someone something that is their ONLY OPTION just because you're an uptight fuckwater?! You ask her humiliating questions about if she has kids, if she is in a relationship, if she's married, if she's been raped, but you don't once ask about her FUCKING HEALTH? This woman's in serious trouble and you've got the gall, the nerve, the utter fucking temerity to say that morality enters into your decision to deny her emergency contraception because OH NOES SHE IS NOT TEH MARRIED OR RAPED? You call it morality to basically decide that, since she's not shackled at the wrists and ankles to a man by law and church, and hasn't been raped, she must obviously be OH NOES TEH SLUT and you're not going to help her?

9/14/2006

Two weeks after telling police that her son had been snatched from his crib, Melinda Duckett found herself reeling in an interview with TV’s famously prosecutorial Nancy Grace. Before it was over, Grace was pounding her desk and loudly demanding to know: "Where were you? Why aren’t you telling us where you were that day?" A day after the taping, Duckett, 21, shot herself to death, deepening the mystery of what happened to the boy.

Here’s the transcript of the show.

...

And that dumbass Glenn Beck has the nerve to call Cindy Sheehan a tragedy whore, when he shares the primetime lineup of Headline News with the worst one on this fucking planet?!

While President Bush and other Republican politicians spent the day exploiting the memory of those we lost five years ago, the nation overlooked a grim milestone: More Americans have now died in Iraq than died on 9/11. Iraq didn't attack us on that day, and our misguided policy there has now taken more American lives than Al Qaeda.

I wondered what I'd say on the day this happened. I knew it would come, and I wondered what would be the right thing to say.

All I can say is, why? Why are so many Americans not coming home? Why are so many families without members? Why are so many lives being lost for nothing?

9/11/2006

I know I haven't updated much lately. It's mostly because I've been working a lot.

Today is 9/11/06. Five years. Five years since the attacks. Five long, hard years of being told that having our freedoms taken away is patriotic. Five years of being told to shut up and comply. Five years of watching good people die for no good reason. Five years of watching liars lie about the reason we're at war with someone who didn't attack us. Five years of being told that I'm some kind of traitor for speaking my mind. Five years of fear being used as a dead weight to beat us. Five years of being distracted from the mistakes of the bunglers in office by a complicit media.

Five years have passed. I feel no more safe from terrorist attacks. And I feel a lot more fearful of a government that is being given free reign to destroy what once defined our country.

Five years of being fucking miserable because of this shit. I'm tired of it.

9/01/2006

One of the reasons Fox News is the only news that can be trusted is because of the high caliber of the people who work there. Unfortunately, the two Fox journalists who were recently kidnapped, Steven Centanni and Olaf Wiig, did not live up to the high standards of Fox News while they were in captivity. Many in the conservative blogosphere believe that by surviving their captivity, they let us down.

Yes, this is satire.

Yes, this is what some wingnuts actually believe - that the fact that the two captured Faux News cameramen weren't tortured and killed proves not that the people doing these kind of things aren't all as brutal and evil as the wingnuts lead us to believe, but that anyone who comes back alive is obviously a traitor. That's the wingnut mindset - "either prove our hatred to be grounded in fact or we'll say you're a terrorist!". Fucking SAD.

Oh, and read the comments while you're at it - those are some shining examples of wingnut psychosis. They believe this shit! Makes me bloody sick. Makes me sad I share a part of the web with these kind of nutjobs.

Karr is just a whacked-out pedophile who thinks he killed Ramsey. You may heap your praise upon me.

Sad part is, the networks of the Right Wing Spin Machine are still covering this psycho's every move when there's more important things to cover. The Iraq Quagmire is still going on. New Orleans is still in a shambles. The Bush Administration is still lying and conflating. Hell, I'm more concerned about the fact that they caught that cult-leading psycho Warren Jeffs than about Karr.

So what are they covering on the news? Well, yeah, they're covering Jeffs' capture, but mostly it's "Karr didn't do it, but we're still gonna give him infamy!"

And people wonder why I keep talking shit about the media. Could it be because they have their collective head up their collective ass?